Indian Country Today Media Network.com - Jan Brewerhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/tags/jan-brewer-0
enHow Did I Miss That? Goldman Sachs: The Vampire Squid; Merle Haggardhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/28/how-did-i-miss-goldman-sachs-vampire-squid-merle-haggard-153776
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>There’s an Internet meme going around that the name for a group of baboons is a “congress.” Very funny, but untrue. The proper term is “troop.” In addition to being incorrect, my Cousin Ray Sixkiller called the meme “insulting to baboons.”</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em> reported that an organization has formed in Kern County, California to preserve the boyhood home of country music legend Merle Haggard, 76.</p>
</p>
<div class="media-youtube-video media-image media-image-left media-youtube-1">
<iframe class="media-youtube-player" width="600" height="450" title="Merle Haggard - Working Man Blues" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fbEstJ98TcM?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="">Video of Merle Haggard - Working Man Blues</iframe></div>
<p>The house was put together during the Depression by Haggard’s Okie father, a carpenter for the Santa Fe Railroad, who created a home for his family from a surplus boxcar. “Save Hag’s Boxcar” promises to build a similar-size home for the current occupant if they can raise the money to move the boxcar to a museum in Bakersfield. Haggard’s father walked on from a stroke when the boy was 9, and Hag hopped his first freight train at 11, beginning “the juvenile delinquency, the incarcerations, the five marriages and bankruptcy.” He poured his pain into the “Bakersfield Sound,” a gritty alternative to the slickness Nashville had become.</p>
<p><em>The Denver Post</em> reported that Colorado Republican State Sen. Bernie Herpin testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to limits on magazine capacity that it “was maybe a good thing he (Aurora theater shooter James Holmes) had a 100 round magazine because it jammed.” “What if,” Cousin Ray wanted to know, “the 100 round magazine on your hunting weapon jammed just as you were about to be attacked by an angry herd of Colorado antelopes armed with AK-47s?”</p>
<p>Matt Taibbi, probably the best writer in the popular media on how the investment banks ran the world economy into the ditch, posted an announcement that he’s leaving <em>Rolling Stone</em> for First Look Media, the outfit that now employs the reporter who broke most of Edward Snowden’s revelations. I am known in my small circle for christening the investment bank Goldman, Sachs “Golden Sacks.” Taibbi called it “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” “Steve,” consoled my dear Cousin Ray Sixkiller, “you can’t win them all.”</p>
<p><em>The Courier of Montgomery County</em> reports on an actual case of voter fraud in Texas. Seven people allegedly switched their voter registration to a Residence Inn for the purpose of taking control of a Road Utility District. This works in a state where a Municipal Utility District once legally floated $400 million in bonds on the vote of one guy living in a FEMA trailer at the behest of developers who expected to flip the property to real residents who would then have to pay off the bonds with property taxes. “If this sounds odd,” commented Cousin Ray, “explain how voter ID laws could stop it?”</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 17:00:43 +0000mazecyrus153776 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/28/how-did-i-miss-goldman-sachs-vampire-squid-merle-haggard-153776#commentsGays, Redskins & MLK: The U.S. Is Still Raising Arizonahttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/25/gays-redskins-mlk-us-still-raising-arizona
<fieldset class="field-group-fieldset group-opinions-body form-wrapper" id="node_opinion_rss_group_opinions_body"><legend><span class="fieldset-legend">Body</span></legend><div class="fieldset-wrapper"><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Arizona is at it again, and “it” goes back to when Arizona was a territory rather than a state. <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=2&amp;res=9D01E7D81138E033A25751C1A9669D94649FD7CF" target="_blank"><em>The New York Times</em> reported on October 12, 1885</a> about a proposal in New Mexico to reinstate a $250 bounty on Apache scalps, and mentioned that Tombstone, Arizona had actually increased their bounty to $500. According to the <em>Times</em>, bounties on Apache hair were in effect in Pima, Yavapai, Yuma, Maricopa and—yes—Cochise and Apache counties.</p>
<p>Some people opposed the bounties out of “sentimentality,” but others lodged the practical objection that it’s hard to tell one “redskin” from another when the individual has become a piece of skin hanging from a saddle horn, and many bounty hunters were cashing in by murdering people from more peaceable tribes. The bounty was also supposedly limited to “a buck Indian,” but I’m not clear how one would determine the sex of the “redskin.”</p>
<p>While I find this discussion distasteful, I do hope the supporters of the Washington football team’s “honoring” of us are paying attention to the genesis of their team name.</p>
<p>Arizona Territory started out with the policy of separating farming tribes from their water rights and separating hunter-gatherer tribes from their hair. Enforcement of white privilege has of course become subtler in the 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> centuries.</p>
<p>In modern times, there was the brouhaha over the holiday for Martin Luther King. Arizona was the last state to get on board. A bill to recognize the holiday failed in the legislature.</p>
<p>Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt declared the King holiday by executive order, but that order was rescinded by the next Republican Governor, Evan Mecham. The question was put to a referendum, and Gov. Meacham campaigned against it, commenting in a liberal moment, “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” The referendum failed.</p>
<p>Note the assumption that “doing a lot for the colored people” does not benefit the nation as a whole, does not help create the “more perfect union” envisioned in the preamble to the Constitution. Like the “redskins,” other non-whites are to remain on the outside looking in.</p>
<p>The NFL, more conscious of African-American feelings than they are of Indian feelings, relocated Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium to the Rose Bowl. Everybody knows the NFL is non-political, right?</p>
<p>The MLK holiday was finally enacted as a result of a new referendum in 1992, the Arizona Legislature proving itself unable to lead a prairie dog colony. The controversy cost Arizona businesses millions of dollars and Arizona citizens a great deal of embarrassment.</p>
<p>The boycott stopped and Arizona’s racism dropped under the national radar until 2010, when Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, which became known nationally as SB 1070 or the “brown in a no brown zone” law.</p>
<p>This law purported to enable police to demand paper proof of citizenship from anyone they suspected not to have such proof, and commanded police to arrest persons unable to produce papers. You know, like the old Soviet Union?</p>
<p>The Supreme Court of the US shot down some of the worst of SB 1070, but not before copycat laws sprung up around the country and a German Mercedes-Benz executive was arrested under the Alabama copycat law for leaving his passport in his hotel room in a county where Mercedes-Benz was a major employer. Arizona Indians visiting in big cities were also vulnerable to harassment for brown in a no brown zone because they were as easily mistaken for Mexicans as pueblo dwellers were mistaken for Apaches under the old bounty laws.</p>
<p>The boycott of Arizona over bigotry cranked up again and, once more, Arizona hotels and restaurants paid a big price until the SCOTUS acted. I cannot resist noting here that when I have visited in Europe, I have always left my passport in a hotel safe, because losing my passport while overseas would be a much bigger hassle than losing my credit card. So I was a bit shocked when some US states started arresting people for doing the same thing I had always thought was common sense. But what’s common sense in the face of prejudice?</p>
<p>Arizona’s latest contribution to the history of American bigotry is on Gov. Jan Brewer’s desk as I write, and the boycott beast is rumbling once more. The latest law creates a “religious freedom” exemption from public accommodations laws if businesses do not wish to serve gay people for religious reasons.</p>
<p>Religious reasons? An exclusion from public accommodations law for <em>religious reasons?</em></p>
<p>Killing of American Indians, for scalp bounties or just in the process of robbing or raping, was backed up by “religious reasons.” Please search your history books for the <em>Requerimiento. </em>See also, the Valladolid debate of 1550-51, where the issue was the existence of humanity in American Indians according to the Christian God.</p>
<p>Religious reasons?</p>
<p>Enslaving of Africans proceeded with a firm foundation in Christian theology. See, in your history library, Arthur Lovejoy’s <em>The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea. </em>All of creation—animal, plant, and even mineral—is part of a hierarchy defined by “closeness to God,” and nonwhites are much farther from God than whites and therefore subject to the dominion of whites just as farm animals are subject to the dominion of humans.</p>
<p>Religious reasons?</p>
<p>English common law, sometimes claimed to date from 1066 as a historical convenience, said that when you hold yourself out to the public as a provider of goods or services, you lose the right of private choice in who you may serve. The old signs you still see, “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone,” were an attempt to abrogate the common law and, later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The translation would be “No Niggers Here.”</p>
<p>You have no such right to reserve. When you serve the public, you may turn away people who are drunk or disorderly or who violate your dress code or who present the wrong credit card. But not persons of the “wrong” skin color or gender identity or religious beliefs. This is true of any state rooted in the English common law, which is to say every state but Louisiana.</p>
<p>There can be no exception for a religious belief that God endorses your bigotry, since every flavor of bigotry has always claimed to be acting on behalf of some God—just like every army has God on its side.</p>
<p>Are you listening, Arizona?</p>
<p><span><em><span>Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.</span></em></span></p>
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<div class="field field-name-field-short-title field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Short title:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The U.S. Is Still Raising Arizona</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-category field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Category:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/discrimination" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Discrimination</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/government" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Government</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/category/politics" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Politics</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/racism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Racism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-full-name field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Full name:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Steve Russell</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/steve-russell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Russell</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/newt-gingrich" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pima</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/yavapai" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Yavapai</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/yuma" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Yuma</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/carlos-dews" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maricopa</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/cochise" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cochise</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/apache" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Apache</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/arizona" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arizona</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jan-brewer-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan Brewer</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/redskins" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Redskins</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/nfl" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">NFL</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/martin-luther-king" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Martin Luther King</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-story field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Story Cluster:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/story/redskins" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Redskins</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author-image field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Author image:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/steve-russell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Russell</a></div></div></div>Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:06:48 +0000mazecyrus153738 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/02/25/gays-redskins-mlk-us-still-raising-arizona#commentsMarty Two Bulls, 'Arizona Immigration Laws'http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/07/15/marty-two-bulls-arizona-immigration-laws
<div class="field field-name-field-cartoon-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://d1jrw5jterzxwu.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/uploads/2012/07/marty-two-bulls-arizona-immigration-laws.jpg?itok=ezHt0t1P" width="220" height="141" alt="" /></div></div></div>Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:36:19 +0000jrobertson123659 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/07/15/marty-two-bulls-arizona-immigration-laws#commentsArizona Gov. Jan Brewer Not Attending Obama’s Dinner, Endorses Romneyhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/26/arizona-gov-jan-brewer-not-attending-obamas-dinner-endorses-romney-100096
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Arizona Gov.</p></div></div></div>Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:42:24 +0000kpolisse100096 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/26/arizona-gov-jan-brewer-not-attending-obamas-dinner-endorses-romney-100096#commentsImmigration: From Florida to Arizona, and Hispanics to Native Americans—A Topic of Interesthttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/28/immigration-florida-arizona-and-hispanics-native-americans-topic-interest-78792
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Arizona has SB 1070, Florida has roughly 1.5 million Hispanic voters and leading Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has activists asking why he would veto the DREAM Act.</p></div></div></div>Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:00:46 +0000kpolisse78792 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/01/28/immigration-florida-arizona-and-hispanics-native-americans-topic-interest-78792#commentsWeapon Used to Kill American Indians Now Arizona State Gunhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/05/02/weapon-used-kill-american-indians-now-arizona-state-gun-31598
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>On April 28, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law SB 1610, which designates the Colt .45 caliber handgun—a weapon that was used to kill many Indians, including women and children during the Indian Wars of the 19<sup>th</sup> century—to its </p></div></div></div>Mon, 02 May 2011 20:02:50 +0000kpolisse31598 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/05/02/weapon-used-kill-american-indians-now-arizona-state-gun-31598#commentsArizona Casino Dispute Hits Legislative Snaghttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/02/12/arizona-casino-dispute-hits-legislative-snag-17210
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>PHOENIX, Ariz. – An effort by the Arizona State Legislature to defeat a tribal casino from being built within the Phoenix urban area was signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on February 1.</p></div></div></div>Sat, 12 Feb 2011 19:00:07 +0000jrobertson17210 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/02/12/arizona-casino-dispute-hits-legislative-snag-17210#commentsSupreme Court Strikes Down Parts of Arizona Anti-Immigration Lawhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-parts-arizona-anti-immigration-law-120258
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>WASHINGTON – In a case watched closely by tribal observers concerned about their families who live on the United States-Mexico border, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down several controversial parts of an Arizona anti-immigration law.</p></div></div></div>Mon, 25 Jun 2012 20:04:24 +0000kpolisse120258 at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.comhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/06/25/supreme-court-strikes-down-parts-arizona-anti-immigration-law-120258#comments